I had an idea for a game recently which I think would be impossible, but a nice concept.
Basically you play a renegade cop/vigilante of some kind, who must solve a series of murders by using the evidence you find at the case to find suspects (nothing new here), but then your job is to stalk them to find out who was the murderer, by making observations about their behaviour and maintaining undetectability.
The plan is to have 200 characters in the town, all of whom have completely independent lives and run through the course of their days on a pre-existing schedule. You can talk to them and each will have their own personality, and recognise you if you make yourself seen too much or if you befriend them.
This game is partly inspired by Darkly Dreaming Dexter, partly by In a World of their Own, and partly by the Character Control Module.
The CCM wouldn't work in this case because it controls the characters by putting them all in the current room, just invisible if they aren't 'in' the room. This is a problem because there are character count limitations in rooms.
My idea for controlling these characters is to have a massive seven day schedule for every character in the game (this is where it starts getting unfeasible) and whenever you change room, the game checks the schedule for who is due to be in the room and what they are due to be doing, with a time compensation scheme for schedule interruptions causes by the player interacting with characters within the game.
The biggest problem with this game is the massive overhead work of constructing 200 characters, not to mention the hundreds of rooms which would be needed. In order to keep file size down, clever coding techniques would have to be used left and right (i.e. doubling, tripling and quadrupling up on characters and re-using rooms)
The other issue is the limitations of the Point and Click mechanics, as this would work a lot better as a 3d-sandbox world, so the navigation of the town would be less convoluted. An overhead driving mini game would remedy this perhaps?
OK, so that's the idea. Thoughts?
Basically you play a renegade cop/vigilante of some kind, who must solve a series of murders by using the evidence you find at the case to find suspects (nothing new here), but then your job is to stalk them to find out who was the murderer, by making observations about their behaviour and maintaining undetectability.
The plan is to have 200 characters in the town, all of whom have completely independent lives and run through the course of their days on a pre-existing schedule. You can talk to them and each will have their own personality, and recognise you if you make yourself seen too much or if you befriend them.
This game is partly inspired by Darkly Dreaming Dexter, partly by In a World of their Own, and partly by the Character Control Module.
The CCM wouldn't work in this case because it controls the characters by putting them all in the current room, just invisible if they aren't 'in' the room. This is a problem because there are character count limitations in rooms.
My idea for controlling these characters is to have a massive seven day schedule for every character in the game (this is where it starts getting unfeasible) and whenever you change room, the game checks the schedule for who is due to be in the room and what they are due to be doing, with a time compensation scheme for schedule interruptions causes by the player interacting with characters within the game.
The biggest problem with this game is the massive overhead work of constructing 200 characters, not to mention the hundreds of rooms which would be needed. In order to keep file size down, clever coding techniques would have to be used left and right (i.e. doubling, tripling and quadrupling up on characters and re-using rooms)
The other issue is the limitations of the Point and Click mechanics, as this would work a lot better as a 3d-sandbox world, so the navigation of the town would be less convoluted. An overhead driving mini game would remedy this perhaps?
OK, so that's the idea. Thoughts?
